"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. John 3:16
Today we are beginning the next part of our study on love and grace. Over the next several days we will peer into the Word and let the Spirit reveal the truth about God's grace in accordance with His incredible love for us. When we understand it we are able to live it out in our own lives and able to extend it to others. We have already looked at love from Paul's letter to the Corinthian church in 1 Corinthians 13 and now we will see how the understanding of love helps us to understand God's grace. In these writings I may share things you have never thought about before and your eyes may be opened to a new revelation. If this happens for you just ask the Holy Spirit to give you wisdom and understanding. For some of you this may not be new revelation but instead it may be a confirmation to what has already been revealed to you. If this person is you then ask the Holy Spirit to build on what He has already taught you and begin to teach it to others.
We are going to start this part of the series with the most quoted passage of Scripture in the world but we are going to look at it over the next couple of days in a way that you may have never looked at it before. When you have read, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son" have you ever asked yourself why God chose to send Jesus to the earth to live among men, be persecuted and killed, hung onthe Cross, and then risen from the dead on the third day? I mean didn't God so love the world that He gave us the Ten Commandments and the other laws to live by so that we could be in relationship with Him? Did God sending Jesus to the earth mean that His first plan was flawed? The answer to both of these questions is no.
God gave the first laws for man to live by for a specific reason as an act of love which we will look at over the next couple of days. And God sending Jesus to the earth did not mean His first plan was flawed. It meant that His first plan was perfect but man was imperfect in following His plan and so out of His incredible love for us He gave a new plan of salvation. God gave the Ten Commandments and other laws to man but man couldn't keep them; which led God to implement a new plan for man's salvation. What I am about to share came through divine revelation one day when driving in the car with my husband. When I shared it with him he said he had never even given it a thought. You may have never given this a thought either but as I share let the Holy Spirit speak to you and open your understanding. Let's begin.
Have you ever really thought about what the Israelites had been living in for over four hundred years before God delivered them out of Egypt? They had been living in a country where they were slaves. They were told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. They had grown accustomed to being in captivity and they made captivity their home. They raised their children with a captive's mindset and they directed their steps to live within the boundaries of their captivity. They weren't given the freedom to think or make their own decisions. And it worked quite well when they obeyed the voice of their masters. They were taken care of and provided for and even though they may have wanted to be set free; they continued to believe that freedom wasn't an option. This led them to adapt to their surroundings, adopt a mindset of captivity and they blindly obeyed their masters. They had the "don't rock the boat" mentality in other words.
When God delivered them out of Egypt can you even imagine what they must have talked about? They must have been filled with great excitement but at the same time I am sure they had great fear of the unknown. These were generations of people who knew nothing except captivity and serving a human master. It is a similar scenario to a person who goes into prison at a very young age today and gets released in their seventies. They may have longed for freedom their entire lives but they really don't know what freedom looks like and they surely don't know how to behave when there are no boundaries or limits put on them by the prison. They had grown accustomed to rules, laws, and regulations. They know that their needs are met for survival if they follow the rules of the prison. If you track criminals who have been in captivity for a long time and then get released, you will find that the majority of them end up right back in prison. Why? Because they have been conditioned to live under the confines of captivity and even though they love the taste of freedom; they don't know how to govern themselves when they are living in freedom. As uncomfortable as it may have been in prison, they knew what to expect and they knew what they had to do in order to survive. The same was true for the Israelite people.
They lived in a mindset of captivity, not out of choice but out of necessity for survival. When God delivered them out of captivity a whole new mindset had to be adopted in order for them to live in their newly given freedom. But you and I both know that it takes a very long time to adopt a new mindset when an old mindset has been so engrained in the subconscious mind and has become a belief system. The first evidence of this mindset is seen in Exodus 14:10 -12 and it is what I will leave you with today to meditate on before we go further into our study.
"And when Pharaoh drew near, the children of Israel lifted their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians marched after them. So they were very afraid, and the children of Israel cried out to the LORD. Then they said to Moses, "Because there were no graves in Egypt, have you taken us away to die in the wilderness? Why have you so dealt with us, to bring us up out of Egypt? Is this not the word that we told you in Egypt, saying, 'Let us alone that we may serve the Egyptians'? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than that we should die in the wilderness."
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